Is it really THAT hard to hackintosh?

[teamjuli0]

Hey all! I'm new around these parts of the woods so please excuse the ignorance in my question. I am however genuinely interested in your guys's opinion. Is it really THAT difficult to build a hackintosh? I know I really did not struggle at all when I built my first hackintosh a month or two ago, all I did was follow the guide to the dot while making sure I had compatible hardware and found it to be rather easy thanks to the amazing work others had done to make this even possible. I know of other peers who have tried to build one of these machines with no success in the past. Apparently, they have found it to be rather difficult which was a bit surprising to me considering the fact that they are very intelligent persons (certainly much smarter than I am). This lead me to really ponder on the question. Is it really that it's difficult to build a hackintosh? Has it just gotten easier over the last couple of years? Is it better documentation and guides that are making this possible and a viable option for users such as myself with minimal knowledge in the inner workings of an os? Or did I just get lucky with an easy first success?

TLDR: Is it really THAT hard to build a successful hackintosh? Has it gotten easier over the last couple of years?

 

[Aluveitie]

It certainly got much easier over time as the community learned and developed more and more sophisticated tools.

On the other hand, if you're unlucky and got a component that makes issues (like a mainboard with a weird ACPI implementation or a GPU with a firmware that does not suite well with MacOS) it can make your life miserable.

 

[olbo]

If everything goes well, it will seem easy, but when you get a problem you may find it hard.

@Aluvetive is right, the correct hardware choices can save you enormous amounts of time.

Plus, it’s not for the faint hearted. you have to enjoy tinkering and problem solving. It can be easy to spend hours on something which seems a simple step if you dont fully understand what is going on. E.g.

 

[teamjuli0]

If everything goes well, it will seem easy, but when you get a problem you may find it hard.

@Aluvetive is right, the correct hardware choices can save you enormous amounts of time.

Plus, it’s not for the faint hearted. you have to enjoy tinkering and problem solving. It can be easy to spend hours on something which seems a simple step if you dont fully understand what is going on. E.g.

That makes sense. I can see why people might get so stressed out and just avoid it all together. It's definitely a lot easier to just buy a real mac and call it a day, then again doing that doesn't come with the reward of feeling like you actually accomplished something cool like building a hackintosh would.

 

[teamjuli0]

It certainly got much easier over time as the community learned and developed more and more sophisticated tools.

On the other hand, if you're unlucky and got a component that makes issues (like a mainboard with a weird ACPI implementation or a GPU with a firmware that does not suite well with MacOS) it can make your life miserable.

I feel like picking out the components is the easy part though if I'm being completely honest. So long as you go with parts others have already tried and confirmed work correctly it shouldn't be too hard. What I feel like might be the more intimidating part is probably system updates. Granted, I haven't actually tried updating my ryzentosh (10.15.4) but just the thought of screwing something up and having to go through the entire process of reinstalling the os sounds like a nightmare. It especially doesn't make it any better that I use my pc as my main workstation so there's also that.